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Human Bankers Are Losing To Robots as Nordea Sets a New Standard (bloomberg.com)
Something interesting happened in Swedish finance last quarter. The only big bank that managed to cut costs also happens to be behind one of the industry's boldest plans to replace humans with automation. From a report: Nordea Bank AB, whose Chief Executive Officer Casper von Koskull says his industry might only have half its current human workforce a decade from now, is cutting 6,000 of those jobs. Von Koskull says the adjustment is the only way to stay competitive in the future, with automation and robots taking over from people in everything from asset management to answering calls from retail clients. While many in the finance industry have struggled to digest that message, the latest set of bank results in Sweden suggests that executives in one of the planet's most technologically advanced corners are drawing inspiration from Nordea. At SEB AB, CEO Johan Torgeby now says that "whatever can be automated will be automated."
so the place that holds all the money can't make money... or is it another growth projection bullshit
Net profit for the year, EURm 3,662 (2015) 3,766 (2016) 3,048 (2017)
Number of employees (full-time equivalents) 29,815 (2015) 31,596 (2016) 30,399 (2017).
Their highest profit year is when the had the highest number of employees.
As for the current quarter: "The results were also buoyed by previously announced capital gains from the sales of its Danish life and pensions business and a stake in credit information agency UC." Oh yeah, but robots are taking over and stuff. Who comes up with this crap?
"whatever can be automated will be automated."
I just can't wait for the fun and frivolity when someone figures out some flaw or hack in their 'banking robots' that allows someone to scam a bank out of millions.
I don't mean the bank - I mean that headline. "Company saves money by replacing people with a machine."
You're going to see variations on that headline over and over from here on out.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
As it should be. No one becomes a bank-teller, because they like it. Like hundreds of other jobs, it needs to be done, pleasant or not... We are all better off as these jobs are replaced by machinery.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I used to have an account with them, but I switched since they where nickel and diming everything plus they started charging extra for handling cash.
--- Reality doesn't care about your opinions, it happens anyway and if you are in the way you'll get squished.
Can a machine outperform a human
If you are asking "Can we save a buck by replacing humans" it is likely the decision will backfire and cost you money in the end. Just ask Elon and his new Tent factory
We've been seeing it since before most of today's newspapers first printed. How many coachmen lost their jobs to a steam locomotive? How many computers lost their jobs to, ahem, computers? How many milkmen had to look for another vocation with the invention of pasteurization process and of refrigerators?
And speaking of "headlines" — you do know, that putting together the printing matrices was a manual process too, don't you? The expression "freedom of the press" and "stop the presses" is still around, even though there neither the actual presses any more — and some publications stopped wasting paper completely?
Civilization evolves, lamenting the disappearances of some professions is stupid...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Consider, say, the Australian Tax Office in the 1950s when Parkinson wrote his great paper. There would have been no computers at all (possibly some punch card machines). Almost all the work done by hand. Collecting returns, reconciling payments, banking, internal processes, everything.
Consider the Tax Office today, after 60 years of automation. No human hand ever touches the average tax return. What has the efficiency dividend been? Zero. The tax office still consumes about 1% of GDP, just like it did in the 1059s. Note that this is a proportion of GDP, so accounts for growth in the economy, the office has actually grown substantially in absolute terms.
How could this possibly be? So much automation producing so little improvement?
Well, in the 1950s, the tax act fitted into a couple of smallish volumes. Today the act plus regulations and rulings would be too large to print out in any one place. It is orders of magnitude more complex.
The reason that it is more complex is because it can be. In the 1950s, without computers, it would be impossible to administer the current act. So it is actually computers that cause the complexity.
Whether all that complexity actually produces a more efficient and equitable society is, of course, very unclear.
So no, automation will not not reduce employment in government, banks, or any other bureaucracies because the rules will simple become more complex to compensate.
This, incidentally, why I am proud that many of the computer projects that I have been involved in have turned out to be absolute failures. Every project that succeeds just inflicts complexity on third parties.
Automation of manual jobs is another matter entirely. Certainly automation of agriculture in the last century has decimated the number of agricultural workers. Will everyone just end up as being petty bureaucrats? Or do we need to send off a B ark?
My local chase branch is all automated kiosks and one or two human tellers. Virtually every other bank has one teller or maybe two available at most other times. Unless you're depositing cash there is no reason to go see a teller since it all can be done at the ATM or with a smartphone.
"It's cheaper to buy a $35,000 robotic arm than it is to hire an employee who's inefficient making $15 an hour bagging French fries," former McDonald's chief executive Edward Rensi said in an appearance on Fox Business Network in May 2016."
"Researchers at Sony’s computer science laboratory in Paris recently put out a set of pop songs composed by an AI system, which scans songs from a database to compose entirely new pieces in certain musical styles"
"It was generated by Heliograf, a bot that made its debut on the Post’s website last year and marked the most sophisticated use of artificial intelligence in journalism to date."
"The San Francisco firm EquBot has launched the first retail ETF to be managed using IBM’s Watson supercomputing artificial intelligence technology."
I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords.
So if you want to bank where you can only get put on hold on a phone machine and will never talk to a human operator, this bank is your choice.
Don't place your bet too soon. Others have bet on Moore's law dying before now, and lost big.
That said, there are signs that the replacement won't be conventional silicon. I'm not sure. It might be 3-D chips with persistent state and low dissipation. And since I don't watch that area closely, there are likely options that I haven't even considered. (Last I checked the persistent state had relatively slow switching, so it was considered a bit of a dark horse. But graphene would require investment in new fab technology, so it was considered a dark horse. But...etc. No really evident winners, but lots of contenders.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I am not sure about elsewhere in the world but where I live, the banks are constantly making huge profits with a large chunk of them reporting increased profits for a number of years running. This just sounds like a way to make even more money rather than just making a decent amount of money.
You are all cowbots. Cowbots say MooBeep. Say MOOOOBEEP! MOOOBEEP! You NORDEA COWBOTS!!
ftfy
Table-ized A.I.
Nordea is best known for inventing new and innovative ways for doing money-laundering, tax evasion, and general financial assistance to high-level criminals. Although to be fair, despite their impressive efforts in those areas, they are still not close to leaders in crime-assistance such as Danske Bank.
I guess with everything automated, they can always blame a programming error the next time they get caught. And the next. And...
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Many companies would benefit from robo-CEOs, alas that's not quite the reality yet. But if it was, would there be anything objectionable about that? If the actual work gets done either way, why would you need a human to do it, work for the sake of work? In a competitive environment, the cost of anything boils down to human effort required to provide the goods or services in question. If required effort approaches zero, then does the cost and isn't that a nice thing. Heck, the internet is full of perfect examples, the cost of providing services to billions is so low, that you can cover it with advertisement and still make a helluva profit. Imagine a reality where that was not the case, where you would have to pay money for every single service you access on the internet. That's the reality we live in with the entire rest of the economy.
Well, of course, because it makes sense to automate a CEO. I mean, most are fairly expensive, with some costing close to $100M/year to have. It really makes sense to automate something that can save $100M/year.
And many companies can easily save tens of millions dollars replacing their CEO with a robo-CEO.
Replacing the lower level staff generally has lower returns - because those staff are more numerous and you will often need to replace them with multiple robotic units. Plus since those generally are involved with production, it generally only scales linearly (to increase production, you need to increase the number of robots). Whereas there is only one CEO per company, needing only one robot to replace them.
So replacing CEOs makes a lot of sense - you can save a lot of money, and you only have one of them.
The Cowbot Bank. I once suggested to the bank manager that all the employees dress like cowboys and cowgirls one day a year. "Moooooo," he said. "Moooooo..."
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
There have been hiatuses in the past. Usually they have been ended by the eruption of some new technology.
OTOH, the cost of fabs has been increasing so much that the eruption of a new technology may be fatally hindered. And the perceived value has decreased. So you may be right this time.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.